Interdisciplinary Design and Evaluation of Dependability (INDEED)

计算机在组织中扮演着越来越重要的角色--例如，医院或工厂--这些组织因此成为基于计算机的系统。这些系统的可靠性是一个主要的社会问题。作为回应，EPSRC资助了城市大学、爱丁堡大学、兰开斯特大学、纽卡斯尔大学和约克大学之间的可信性跨学科研究合作(DIRC)。DIRC的前提是，不应将可靠性作为一个纯粹的技术问题来研究，而应将其作为计算机系统与其采购、开发和使用的环境相结合的一种社会技术特性来研究。DIRC因此组建了一支由计算机科学家、心理学家、社会学家和统计学家组成的世界级跨学科团队，通过工程学和社会科学之间罕见的合作取得了实质性成果。INDEED将以DIRC的成果为基础，解决在扩展这些结果并将其与当前实践相结合方面的重要挑战，以确保对可靠系统的设计和评估产生真正的、长期的影响。它将在四个主要研究活动中应用多学科方法：时机和结构。这项工作将进一步发展DIRC的时间带概念，用于推理在不同时间尺度上展开的过程，从微秒到几天，在一个系统内。我们将定义一种适当的描述性语言，并对其进行扩展以处理不同时间段中事件之间的概率关系。然后，我们将构建一个在案例研究中使用的软件工具，以验证在构建可靠系统时使用时间段。适应和多样性。这项活动将帮助社会技术系统的设计者和评估者解决由于难以预测人们如何适应计算机而引起的一些难题。我们将大大增强设计师对适应和多样性现象进行量化分析、控制和利用的能力，尽管这些现象经常被非正式地认识到，但需要更彻底和正式的处理。我们的重点将是数据丰富、知识密集型的活动，这些活动越来越多地得到自动化、责任和信任的支持。在基于计算机的系统中，不适当的责任分配或感知，以及对各种系统组件的不适当的信任级别，是导致故障的重要原因。这项工作将通过开发必要的符号、技术和软件工具，支持在设计和部署此类系统期间对责任和信任进行建模、管理和分析。案例是证据和推理的网络，通过它来评估系统可靠性。DIRC定义了基于可信度的案例，它描述了可靠性声明以及对这些声明的可信度。我们将使用时间段工作的结果，制定详细和组织案件的方法；指导如何使用更多不同的证据和论点，以增强信心；对导致人们对案件的信任低于(或超过)其内容所需的因素的新的跨学科理解。这些活动被纳入一个连贯的工作方案。整合机制是使用真实世界的案例研究，我们与项目中的合作伙伴(VOVA、英国能源、CAA和Qinetiq)合作，以挑战和验证我们的研究。

Computers increasingly play vital roles in organisations - e.g., hospitals or factories - which thus become computer-based systems . The dependability of these systems is a major societal concern. In response, EPSRC funded the Dependability Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (DIRC) between City, Edinburgh, Lancaster, Newcastle and York universities. DIRC was based on the premise that dependability must be studied not as a purely technical issue, but as a socio-technical property of the combination of a computing system with the environments in which it is procured, developed and used. DIRC thus assembled a world class interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians, which has achieved substantial results through a rare degree of collaboration between engineering and social sciences.INDEED will build on DIRC's results to address important challenges in extending these results and combining them with current practices, to ensure a real, long-term impact on the design and evaluation of dependable systems. It will apply a multidisciplinary approach in four major research activities:Timing and Structure. This work will further develop DIRC's time band concept for reasoning about processes that unfold on different time scales, from microseconds to days, within a system. We will define an appropriate descriptive language, and extend it to deal with probabilistic relationships between events in different time bands. We will then build a software tool to use in case studies, to validate the use of time bands in structuring dependable systems. Adaptation and diversity. This activity will help designers and assessors of socio-technical systems to address some of the hard problems caused by the difficulty of predicting how people adapt to computers. We will give designers greatly enhanced abilities to analyse quantitatively, control and exploit the phenomena of adaptation and diversity, which although often recognised in informal terms need more thorough and formal treatment. Our focus will be data-rich, knowledge intensive activities that are increasingly supported by automation.Responsibility and trust. Inappropriate allocation or perception of responsibilities, and inappropriate levels of trust in the various system components, are important causes of failure in computer-based systems. This work will support the modelling, management and analysis of responsibility and trust during the design and deployment of such systems, by developing the necessary notations, techniques and software tools.Confidence and Uncertainty in dependability cases. A case is the web of evidence and reasoning through which system dependability is assessed. DIRC defined confidence-based cases, which describe dependability claims together with the degree of confidence that can be had in them. We will produce methods for detailing and structuring cases, using the results of work on time bands; guidance for using more diverse evidence and arguments towards increasing confidence; new interdisciplinary understanding of the factors causing people to trust a case less (or more) than its contents warrant.These activities are integrated into a coherent programme of work. An integration mechanism is the use of real-world case studies where we work with our partners in the project (Voca, British Energy, CAA and Qinetiq) to challenge and validate our research.